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Just for background, the relevance is this: We have conscious/immediate experience. Things like the feeling of seeing the color red or feeling an itch. There
by cameldrv 2y ago
Just for background, the relevance is this: We have conscious/immediate experience. Things like the feeling of seeing the color red or feeling an itch. There seems to be no way to account for this in physics. It could be that there is some aspect of physics which only operates on brain like objects and produces these feelings.
The problem is that we are all here on hacker news talking about this, so somehow this aspect is not just observing, it’s affecting our brains enough that at least we know it exists.
So then the problem is that physics as we understand it doesn’t provide much room for an external force to affect things. The one area where there is maybe some wiggle room is wave function collapse. The state of a quantum system after collapse appears to be completely random, so it’s possible that an external force could affect it.
- llamaimperative 2y ago> The state of a quantum system after collapse appears to be completely random, so it’s possible that an external force could affect it. "Completely random" means the opposite of "an external force could affect it." It means there is no relationship between input and output.
- cameldrv 2y ago“Appears to be completely random.” The claim is that perhaps for most objects it is completely random, but maybe for some objects like our brain, perhaps the coin is biased in a way that allows information to flow from the qualia world to the physical world.
- baggy_trough 2y agoI see no reason at all that qualia should depend on quantum mechanics. It's just hand waving at mystical woo.
- cameldrv 2y agoThe issue is that the fact that we can talk about qualia means that they must affect the physical brain, so people search for a loophole in physics where information could move from the world of qualia to the physical world.
- baggy_trough 2y agoYeah, but it's just saying we don't really understand quantum mechanics and we don't understand qualia so maybe these are related. But there are a lot more "unknown unknowns" out there.